Amazon Kindle e-reader

Expert Rating

4.50/5

Pros

Thin, light and compact body

Excellent screen

Very cheap

Cons

Typing with the controller is a pain

Wi-Fi quietly drains the battery

Bottom Line

Amazon's newest, cheapest, smallest, simplest Kindle is, we think, its best. You'll have to be interested in buying books, of course -- just having the Kindle isn't really enough to inspire you to begin reading, and even though there are plenty of cheap books you still have to buy them -- but the Kindle makes it so easy as to be entirely painless. An occasional battery charge via USB (more often if you forget to turn off Wi-Fi when you're not using it) is all the Kindle really needs -- apart from that, it's a seamless and gratifyingly simple electronic book-reading device.

Special Offers

Amazon has refined the Kindle several times since its Australian debut, and each time the e-reader du jour has become increasingly attractive to potential buyers. This iteration of the popular e-book reader — by our count it’s the fourth generation — is smaller, lighter, slimmer and cheaper. Australian buyers are well served with local and international stores to buy from, most popular books are very reasonably priced, and using the device is almost as seamless as it could be.

This review largely covers the most recent updates to the Amazon Kindle. For background info on e-readers, reviews of previous Kindles and competitors, read our Amazon Kindle page.

Amazon Kindle 4: Size and weight

Amazon’s specs page for the Kindle proudly boasts that it’s 30 per cent lighter and 18 per cent smaller overall than the last model — this translates into real-world dimensions of 166mm tall, 114mm wide, and only 8.7mm thick. It’s light (but not enough so that it feels cheap) at 170 grams.

The new Kindle, by virtue of its lack of physical keyboard and slimmed-down dimensions, now fits nicely in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Because of this, we took it where we wouldn’t even consider carrying a paperback. The trade-off is that the Kindle isn’t at all flexible like a paperback, so you’ll need to store it where it won’t get damaged (no sitting on it when it’s in your back pocket, for example).

Amazon Kindle 4: Design

The newest Kindle is the simplest yet, eschewing a keyboard for a far simpler five-way control pad and four basic buttons. There are a pair of ‘shoulder’ buttons on the device’s left and right sides, with the larger button advancing a page and the smaller button retreating. While we realise this has been Kindle house style for a while now, when we started reading with the Kindle 4 we instinctively thought both buttons on the left were for flipping back a page, and both on the right for flipping forward. What we’d propose is a simpler single button on either side of the screen, customisable for each rotation of the Kindle’s reading layout.

The lower button layout — five-way controller, home, menu, keyboard and back buttons — is easy to understand and becomes second nature to use after a short time with the Kindle. The power button, hidden away at the bottom of the device next to the microUSB port, is harder to find for a first-timer. Apart from these buttons, that’s it — nothing else to learn or navigate with.

The new Kindle has built-in Wi-Fi (but no 3G) and a wired USB 2.0 connector for charging and transferring files via PC. We used the Wi-Fi connection (802.11b/g/n supported) to download books off the Amazon Kindle Store, but also transferred PDF, TXT, DOC and JPG files directly onto the device to see all display correctly and with no errors.

You do need to remember to turn off Wi-Fi when you’re not using it, though — it will drain the battery faster than you’d expect. Once during our testing we thought we’d accidentally killed the Kindle, but some testing revealed that we’d inadvertently left the Wi-Fi enabled during a marathon reading session. Thankfully, switching it off is a few seconds’ work.

The screen was particularly good. It is bright and visible from most angles, however heat is an issue, particularly around the Windows button on the front, and on the back where the battery housing is located.

My first impression after unboxing the Q702 is that it is a nice looking unit. Styling is somewhat minimalist but very effective. The tablet part, once detached, has a nice weight, and no buttons or switches are located in awkward or intrusive positions.

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